Month: May 2017

To evaluate this project, I strongly believe that I have successfully worked in a team to create an animated piece for a client.

For my first time ever working for a client, it went well. I got to work with an incredible and devoted team, which we all pulled our weight, and got what we needed to get done by the deadlines that we set. If anything, this is probably the most organised that I’ve ever been, which I feel is mostly because other people were relying on me to do my part and I didn’t want to let them down. Something that I will need to apply to myself when I do my 3rd year project, but it gives me hopes for the future if I’m ever put in a group again. As for working for the clients, it was not what I was expecting. Unlike the other clients that our classmates were working for, ours were not as present. At the beginning where we did our pitch to them, they were very informative about what they wanted and were engaged with what ideas we had. But after the pitch they were pretty much none-existent, I’d send progress emails with links to our blogs so they can keep up-to-date with what we’re doing, as well as asking if there were any changes they would like to add or at the least a reply saying good job. But they never replied which was kind of irritating because we would be continuing working on the animation with constant fear of them replying last minute and asking us to change stuff, plus I feel like we weren’t getting the full client experience like the other groups were, with their clients giving them deadlines to send them updates on the work.

As for how I feel about my performance during the project, I would say I was a team player. Taking on the responsibility on animating the longest scene in the animation, as well doing the editing for the video by myself showed that I was committed to project. I also think that my animating skills have improved in after effects, I can confidently animate a character using the correct procedures, as well as work between After Effects and Photoshop with creating the assets for the scene. Although I might say I did well during this project I made the rookie mistake of working completely off a USB, although I did left copies of my progress on some PC’s, I still worked off it, which came around to bite me in the ass later when it came to rendering the video out, because when I did, some sound effects and background music were missing. And that was because when I was working off USB it didn’t have enough bandwidth to export all the different file formats to put in the render, which ended up with me having to copy all the files on to the PC and re-locate all the files so that they would work.

Overall I am pleased with the end results, as well as how well I worked within a team. If I had any suggestions towards how this project could be better. I would not work off a USB and would like to have had clients who were more active and engaged with what we were doing.

So with the deadline on Friday and with Team Barley Qualified (best team name ever!!!) working hard on animating. I thought I just put up a quick blog post about how I find animating in After Effects and where I’m at.

As I mentioned getting back into to after effects was tricky but over time I managed get back into the swing of things. I can say now that I’m confident with the program itself, although I may not know it completely, I’m can animate a character in after effects using the right procedures.

We are now in our editing stages, we’ve all fully animated our scenes I’m now currently editing all together. Unfortunately I ran into a problem of having some of my test renders not having all the music and sound effects that I included. This was because I was mostly working off of my memory stick which couldn’t handle rendering all of the audio feeds that I had, so when it exported some of the audio clips were missing. To solve this I just shifted everything to C drive on the PC and just redirected all the audio files so that they will work in the render.

So here’s a look at what I’ve been doing so far. I’m quite pleased with how the animation looks, because I expected it to look rough around the edges because of the resizing of the character, but it actually looks clean.

So far the animating has been great so far, kind of tricky at the start, because I was trying to get hand of animating characters in after effects again, and also learning how to correctly import files from Photoshop, for example importing them as compositions instead of footage’s, so that the layers that I create in Photoshop will cross over as well, instead of being a flat image. But to sum up animating is quite simple once you get the hang of it.

At the moment myself and Lydia have got half a of a scene animated, where as Adam has one scene animated and has started another. I myself took on the longest scene to animate which is why it’s taking so long for me to do this one scene, but luckily I’m almost done with that scene, and with the next one that I have to is pretty straight forward and can be done within a matter of hours.

We’ve also got our new script recorded which nice, so we’re pretty much waiting all the scenes to be finished animating then we can put them all together, and I’m confident we’ll submit by the deadline if keep on track.

Made a sort of mini show reel of a run and walk cycle that I’ve done outside if uni. If you remember I did the run cycle over the Easter holidays, and it was a good attempt for a first run cycle, but I completely trashed the saying “Learn to walk before you run” so to justify it I did a walk cycle.

My comments about the walk cycle or sort of similar to the run. A good attempt for a first walk cycle, but a bit jumpy, which weirdly suits that character that’s doing the walking. But hey I’ve got to start somewhere.

We pitched to our clients!!! Yes we finally managed to get David and Andrew to come in so we could pitch to them, and they loved it! Despite a few additions to the script, which was expected because it was only a first draft, but they liked the style of animation as well as the way that we’re approaching the brief, which is awesome because we don’t have to change a lot of things that we did already. So after pitching we all cracked on to our tasked. Adam and Lydia cracked on with making more assets and scenes, while I made the additions to the script (with input from them) which you can check out here – Emergency Vehicle Script Draft 2.

Also I’ve created some assets myself. I’m working on two scenes of the animations, which involves a inside view of the car and a street view. So far so good, most of the assets and scenes are completed and I’ve whacked some of the bits into After Effects, but I’ve still got some bits to create before I animated. I’ll probably discuss with what I’ve done so far with my group tomorrow.

Also we have got some bits animated on Adam‘s computer, roughly about 12 seconds, but not as much as we planned to do a couple a weeks back, hopefully we’ll have more scenes animated by the end of the week.

(I’m writing this on a very sunny day, that’s why the title of the blog is called what it is)